How to Write Dialogue That Sounds Real: Lessons from Hemingway, Carver, and Le Carré

Good dialogue gives the illusion of real speech without transcribing it. In a café conversation, you hear hesitations, digressions and anecdotes that lead nowhere, and that verbatim, copied as is into a novel, bores the reader. Literary dialogue is a construction, compressed, directed and loaded with implication, which has to sound true without being a faithful transcript.

Three writers pushed this art in different directions. Ernest Hemingway buries the essential beneath the surface: in "Hills Like White Elephants," a 1927 story, a man and a young woman talk about an "operation" without ever naming it, and the word abortion never appears once even though it's the whole subject. Raymond Carver, with his editor Gordon Lish, sculpts by subtraction, since the published version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) is roughly half the manuscript Carver handed in. John le Carré makes his spies talk so they can be unmasked, and in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the interrogator already knows the answer and only wants to see what the other person chooses to say.

Let's look at what each one teaches us, then at the practical rules we can draw from them.

The iceberg theory: Hemingway and the art of omission

In Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway sets out what would become his best-known theory:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

For dialogue, the rule is simple: have your character say what slips out or what they're hiding, rather than what they think. "Hills Like White Elephants" rests entirely on this principle. The two characters talk about drinks, hills that look like elephants, a "perfectly simple operation" and a bead curtain, and through these banalities the reader pieces together a couple coming apart, while the essential information stays below the waterline.

The iceberg imposes a discipline, because the writer has to know exactly what's happening beneath the surface; otherwise, according to Hemingway, they only leave holes in the text. Allusive dialogue therefore demands more work, and you only write the implicit well after you've made the explicit clear in your notes.

Carver and the cut: what absence says

Raymond Carver's editorial history is now well documented. Gordon Lish, his editor at Knopf, cut nearly half of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and trimmed several stories to the bone. In the long version of "Beginners," published after Carver's death in 2009 in the collection of the same name, the main character was called Herb, and Lish renamed him Mel; the violent former partner was called Carl, and he became Ed. Carver protested, then gave in, and it's this version, the one we know, that founded what was called, rightly or wrongly, American minimalism.

We can debate how much of that voice came from Carver and how much from Lish. What interests us here is what those cuts teach about dialogue. The story rests on a kitchen conversation around a bottle of gin, where four friends try to say what love is, fail and drink more and more. Lish removed the explanations, the justifications and the prompts, and what remains are the silences, the short lines, the rising alcohol and the fading light. The story works because you feel everything that was taken out.

When dialogue doesn't work, the temptation is to add more, whereas you almost always need to do the opposite: remove the sentence that explains the emotion, the line that answers too neatly, and half the "yes," "of course" and "I see" that pepper our conversations. Dialogue resembles a musical score far more than a stenographic record.

Le Carré and subtext: talking to hide

Robert McKee reminds us in Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for the Page, Stage, and Screen (2016) that a line of dialogue is an action, and that "to say something is to do something." Behind every line, the character pursues a goal, whether to convince, reassure, humiliate or extort. The text is what they say aloud, and the subtext is what they're trying to get or to hide.

John le Carré illustrates this principle better than anyone. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), the great flashback scene shows George Smiley facing Karla, his future Soviet adversary, who doesn't say a word throughout. The exchange rests entirely on Smiley's monologue, as he talks for two, and on Karla's stubborn silence, so that this absence of an answer becomes an answer in itself.

Le Carré suggests a useful rule: in a tense scene, ask yourself what each character doesn't want anyone to know about them, because that unspoken thing will structure the conversation. The spy who knows he's been found out plays for time, and the investigator who already knows the answer asks the question to watch the lie being built. Dialogue that works is almost always dialogue in which someone lies, dodges, conceals or keeps quiet about what they think.

"Said" is almost always enough: Elmore Leonard and dialogue tags

In July 2001, Elmore Leonard published his "10 Rules of Writing" in the New York Times, three of which concern dialogue directly.

Rule 3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. For Leonard, the line belongs to the character, while the verb is where the writer sticks their nose in. "Grumbled," "hissed," "sighed" or "murmured" draw attention to the tag at the expense of the line.

Rule 4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said." Leonard considered "he said gravely" a mortal sin, because the adverb puts outside the line an emotion that should be inside it.

Rule 5. Exclamation points follow the same logic and should stay rare. Leonard allowed two or three per 100,000 words.

These rules leave room for interpretation, but their good sense is obvious: in a beginner's manuscript, it's almost always the excess of varied tags and adverbs that gives away the writer who's unsure. The reader passes through "said" without seeing it, and that's exactly what you want from a tag.

Beats: replacing the tag with an action

Once your tags are reduced to "said" or "asked," another option remains, which is to pair the line with a gesture. Instead of "I warned you," he said coldly, you can write "I warned you." He pushed his plate away. The gesture shows who's speaking and conveys the emotion without naming it.

This technique has three advantages:

• It anchors the scene in space. Dialogue without bodies, what screenwriters call "talking heads," leaves the reader floating, whereas a gesture reminds them the characters are in a kitchen, a car or a forest.
• It controls the pace. A tag speeds up the exchange and a gesture slows it down, so by alternating the two, you control the tempo of the scene.
• It draws the character. The way someone holds a cigarette, stops to check their phone or looks away before answering says more about them than an adjective.

A gesture on every line becomes mechanical. Place one every three or four exchanges, when you want to mark a turning point or remind the reader where the characters are.

What you can cut from dialogue

Hemingway, Carver and Leonard ultimately share one rule: cut everything that can be cut. In practice, that means:

• greetings and introductions, like "Hi, Mark, how are you? Fine, and you?", since you can almost always enter the conversation two lines later;
• polite formulas and filler words that add nothing ("I just wanted to say," "you know," "so");
• restatements of what the other character just said;
• explanations that repeat what the reader has already understood;
• exposition dialogue where one character tells the other what they both already know ("As you know, my brother Paul, who's a cardiologist in Lyon..."). Robert McKee calls this the "as you know, Bob" problem and advises staging the information instead of having it recited.

Dialogue cut three times is rarely worse than its first version.

Putting your dialogue to the voice test

The last rule is the most banal and the most effective: read your dialogue aloud, articulating each word, instead of skimming it or hearing it in your head.

Here's what to listen for:

• Lines that run too long. In real conversation, people interrupt each other, and a six-sentence speech is almost always too long.
• Unsayable sentences. If you stumble over a line, your character will too.
• Identical rhythms. When two characters make sentences of the same length with the same syntax, they share the same voice, which amounts to saying neither has their own.
• Unexplained shifts in register, like a character who says "I dunno" in one scene and "I do not know" in the next for no dramatic reason.

Actors preparing a play work through the whole text aloud, and novelists would do well to follow them. The exercise is long and tedious, but it lets almost no wrong note slip through.

Dialogue and organizing the manuscript

A dialogue-heavy novel needs organization, since following the voices of ten characters over thirty chapters becomes painstaking work when you write over several months. The editor's character mentions help here: by marking each appearance of a character, you can find every scene where they appear, check that their voice stays consistent across the manuscript and spot the passage where they say "I do not know" when they said "I dunno" three chapters earlier.

The writing itself remains yours, and this tool simply spares you from putting off a difficult scene because you dread searching for everything the character has already said.

Going further

Writing dialogue means trusting what goes unsaid, and three landmarks sum up this article:

1. Hemingway: know what's happening below the waterline, and keep it to yourself.
2. Carver: cut half your first draft, then see what else you can remove.
3. Le Carré: ask yourself what each character is hiding, since that's what makes them talk.

For the rest, tags, adverbs and gestures, Elmore Leonard's rules still hold. Good writers depart from them deliberately, and beginners have every interest in following them for three or four manuscripts before allowing themselves exceptions. The rest comes with time and rewriting, until the day you read your dialogue aloud without wincing.

To go further, see our guide for fiction and our articles on opening a novel and show, don't tell.